The Artillery Research selection offering 40 points in fact delivers only 10! Either the option information is false or there's some form of unexplained accounting going on. Given that there have been two patches so far the effect is to make the game look very shoddy.

Are you referring to the % progress shown? If so each level is twice the amount before it. So 20 points going from lvl1 to 2 would show as 20% but 20 pts from 2 to 3 would only show 10% gain and 3 to 4 shows 5%. It's also rounded down to nearest 10% for the display. I suspect this is your situation. The %'s are meant to be general progress trackers not an exact display so that research timing can't be finitely planned.

That's just what I'm seeing, Alta, and it makes perfect sense in terms of the RoI for technological development. But it would have saved a lot of angst and colourful language directed at the developers if that explanation had been included in the rulebook.